Theoldhag.com

Looking through this child's eyes reveals nothing - baltimoresun.com Contact Us Place an ad Home Delivery Site Map Print Edition Services Become a mySun member Login
HOME MARYLAND NATION/WORLD BUSINESS SPORTS ARTS/LIFE OPINION
MARKETPLACE JOBS CARS REAL ESTATE SHOPPING
ar ts/ li f e > b o o ks & ma g s
Looking through this child's eyes reveals nothing
BY LIZZIE SKURNICK
SPECIAL TO THE SUN
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 9, 2006 Look for Book
>>> Carry Me Down
M.J. Hyland
Canongate Books / 192 pages / $23 Enter keyword (optional) If we got rid of the child narrator, would anybody miss him? Surely his characteristics have gone from enduring Find an Event:
to inuring. First and most foremost, there's his fractured family, usually in the form of a drunken father and an ineffectual mother - one overly close to her charge, mourning a great and fragile Enter a keyword (optional) beauty. His parents have often produced an alternately raging and principled older • Power search
brother, already dead or soon to die, and a preternaturally innocent young sister,
who utters gnomic statements and, if the Lose 10 Pounds in 2
Peapod Grocery Delivery
Peapod Home Grocery older brother lives, is not long for this Control your Hunger With Delivery - Save $10 on first world herself. Our child narrator has a The Miracle of Hoodia as order. Shop from.
mildly offensive habit he mentions too often - say, dandruff-examining or toe-picking. This regression stands in stark contrast to his body, which is erupting with pimples, perspiration and all the other hallmarks of pubescence. But the author loves him nonetheless and wants us to love him too. Don't we know his curious obsession signals his uniqueness (never mind it is often with The Guinness Book of World Records)? Is it even necessary to note that he rarely goes over big with his peers? But his special power counters his alienation from the schoolyard overlords. His tragic belief in a magical strength, the reader is meant to understand, is his dim way of coping with his Looking through this child's eyes reveals nothing - baltimoresun.com miserable life. And if that's not enough to break our hearts, the narrator's voice will. Be it manic, obsessive, ebullient or - worst - entirely without affect, it is here to remind us: It's Hard Out Here for a Kid. John Egan, Irish novelist M.J. Hyland's 12-year old protagonist in Carry Me Down, is about par for the course. His father, often away nights, is filled with sarcasm rather than ambition. John's father has installed the family with his mother, who barely suffers their presence. His parents alternately romance each other and fight, leaving John, otherwise his mother's comrade, bewildered by his place in the home. John is big enough to be mistaken for a man but young enough to lose control of his bladder, which, as you can imagine, cements his place in the classroom pecking order. He scratches his head obsessively, leaving a bloody hole. He is not a bright student, and his book of choice is, in fact, The Guinness Book of World Records, where he believes he will wind up one day, for he has the power to tell when people are lying. Such proof as he can garner he maintains in his journal, which he calls "The Gol of Seil" ("The Log of Lies"), a backward mirror to his view of the world. But if we are to feel the loss of his innocence acutely, John must be thrust under the burden of adult consciousness at some point. The story's pivotal crisis occurs when the father strikes John's grandmother, and she kicks them out. The family winds up in a grimy Dublin housing development, where the elevators are filled with sticky urine, John loses his motorized car to a hallway gang, and John's father begins to visit the prostitutes upstairs. Since we must see through John's blinders, we hear that the women "run the sewing machine" and "bang their canes" all night. The narrator's method of letting us know what this really means is suitably opaque, but this now seems coy rather than poignant. Like a reader coming across the Gol of Seil, readers of Carry Me Down must crack a tediously obvious code, then be irritated when the text yields so little. Meanwhile, the narrative, punctuated by events of little consequence, spools out like a bus station's grainy security video. But had the author compressed them into a short story, we might still wonder why we'd been forced into this narrator's company. The most famous childhood narrator - To Kill a Mockingbird's Scout - is the lens through which the reader sees not only her world, but the town, the South and a country just awakening to the crisis of institutional racism. Through John's eyes, we can barely see John Egan - and what he sees shows us nothing at all. Lizzie Skurnick, a Baltimore writer, is the editor of Old Hag, a literary blog at www.theoldhag.com. Looking through this child's eyes reveals nothing - baltimoresun.com Help Control Seizures
Antiseizure Medicine Can Make A Difference Prophet's Son, a Novel
Terrific Historical Fiction Hope battles despair to Oprah Has Spoken
"You're going to want to take this test" - the free Articles and Information about Borderline Personality Disorder The Treatment of Childhood Epilepsy Using The Copyright 2006, The Baltimore Sun Get Sun home delivery Talk about it E-mail it Print it Contact us Top books & mags headlines
• Season to savor
• The best-told anecdotes need no additional spin
• Tales of the free market's forgotten losers
• Adoring tribute to the pop diva who sang it 'softly with feeling'
• Not enough oxygen to sustain this NASA space tale
Top baltimoresun.com headlines
• Campaign sparks fly over BGE
• Ritual lost as police auctions move online
• Wine to go? Up to Ehrlich
• Defense urges jury to spare Moussaoui's life (11:28 AM)
• Md. hospital charges to rise 15% by July 2009
Most e-mailed in the past 24 hours
1. Baltimore turns the other cheek for Oprah
2. Robinwood to Hollywood and back again
3. Rare birds cared for by rarer people
4. Dan Rodricks: Listen up, Oprah: There are other ways to help
city kids
5. Wine to go? Up to Ehrlich
Looking through this child's eyes reveals nothing - baltimoresun.com • More most e-mailed
b a ck to t o p
Today Live! A&E Today Modern Life Travel Art/Museums Books/Mags Movies Music/Nightlife Restaurants/Food Theater/Dance TV/Media Bay/Beach On Campus Visitors' Guide Home Maryland Nation/World Business Sports Arts/Life Opinion Marketplace Jobs Cars Real Estate Shopping Contact us: Submit feedback, send a letter to the editor, submit a news tip, get subscription info, or place an ad.
baltimoresun.com (TM) and sunspot.net (R) are copyright 2006 by The Baltimore Sun. Terms of Service Privacy Policy Classified partners: Jobs Autos Homes Apartments
Become a mySun member Login

Source: http://www.theoldhag.com/carrymedown.pdf